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Gallium3D Now In Mainline Mesa Code-Base!

02-11-2009, 11:10 AM

Phoronix: Gallium3D Now In Mainline Mesa Code-Base!

Gallium3D, the 3D graphics driver that has long been in development by Tungsten Graphics, has finally entered the mainline Mesa code-base! Gallium3D has a lot of capabilities and will be of much benefit to Linux desktop users once all 3D drivers have been ported to this new architecture (for more information read our articles or the Tungsten Wiki). We shared yesterday that Gallium3D was in the process of being merged and that is now completed within Mesa's master branch...

This is actually a really important milestone for open source 3D drivers; while Gallium3D was hanging out in a branch it wasn't really a practical solution for mainstream drivers. Now that it's in master I think you'll see everyone pile on and start working towards shipping Gallium3D-based drivers. Congrats to all involved.

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This is actually a really important milestone for open source 3D drivers; while Gallium3D was hanging out in a branch it wasn't really a practical solution for mainstream drivers. Now that it's in master I think you'll see everyone pile on and start working towards shipping Gallium3D-based drivers. Congrats to all involved.

Indeed. It translates into something that could get within spitting distance of the peak performance of the proprietary drivers. It makes the story your employer's got more compelling, don't you think?

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Indeed. It translates into something that could get within spitting distance of the peak performance of the proprietary drivers. It makes the story your employer's got more compelling, don't you think?

Yep; without Gallium3D our comment that we thought open source 3D could fairly easily get to 60-70% of fglrx performance would be pretty lame. The last 30% will be hard though and I don't think anyone will bother; about half of the difference comes from a very sophisticated shader compiler, and the other half comes from constant bottom-to-top tuning and optimizing of the stack, from the GL API down to the bottom of the memory manager and command submission code.

That said, if you can run a modern GPU at 60-70% of fglrx performance you're probably gonna be CPU-limited on anything but a CAD workstation app anyways

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Yep; without Gallium3D our comment that we thought open source 3D could fairly easily get to 60-70% of fglrx performance would be pretty lame. The last 30% will be hard though and I don't think anyone will bother; about half of the difference comes from a very sophisticated shader compiler, and the other half comes from constant bottom-to-top tuning and optimizing of the stack, from the GL API down to the bottom of the memory manager and command submission code.

That said, if you can run a modern GPU at 60-70% of fglrx performance you're probably gonna be CPU-limited on anything but a CAD workstation app anyways

That last 30% makes a difference when you're using an integrated card that barely performs (specifically, my Xpress 1100).

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The "pipe" driver is the primary hardware-dependent code, so tuning a cell or intel pipe driver wouldn't affect radeon. On the other hand, under Gallium3D the amount of hardware-dependent code is smaller, and really is a good match with the stuff that is different from one GPU to the next.

The "winsys" driver used to be a mix of hardware-dependent (command submission) and hardware independent (window interface) functions, but AFAIK that has now been broken up to isolate the hw-dependent code in a separate module from the rest.